Thursday, July 24, 2014

An oddity. About 36 hours ago I looked in on Paul Homewood's site, and saw this credulous post. I followed the link to ClimateChangeDispatch, which said:"A new post on The Hockey Schtick reviews a new paper “that finds only about 3.75% [15 ppm] of the CO2 in the lower atmosphere is man-made from the burning of fossil fuels, and thus, the vast remainder of the 400 ppm atmospheric CO2 is from land-use changes and natural sources such as ocean outgassing and plant respiration.”"

It linked to the source, HockeySchtick. There I read an article discussing what seemed to be just a paper on local measurements of CO2 fluctuation as indicated by C14, along with the perturbing effect of nuclear reactor C14. But yes, HS made that claim, and there was a lively discussion involving sensible people like Ferdinand Engelbeen and David Appell saying sensible things about CO2. About 36 comments when I looked, but no-one seemed to notice that the paper just wasn't saying anything about global CO2. Along the way David Appell was banned for saying that the oceans were acidifying.

I saw later another credulous post at Bishop Hill, but here the commenters seemed to see through it fairly quickly. The post, with its links are still not modified.

Anyway, this morning, local time, I tried to follow a link, and got this:"Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist."

And sure enough, just vanished. No explanation, that I could see. Gone. But the linking pages still make their claims without modification.

12 comments:

I think what is of interest is not what was said - the post is repeated elsewhere on line, and the comments were not unusual, apart from the peculiar indifference to what the paper actually said. Rather it is the existing links that lead to nothing. And the embarrassment of the void - I gather HS got a blast from the authors.

But there's nothing peculiar about the indifference. The childlike credulity of Montford, Homewood et al. is wholly typical of a class of people who with supreme irony have appropriated the term "sceptic", which once upon a time described an outlook exactly the opposite to their approach of coming to judgement on the basis of b***er all evidence.

In study of the SalbyStorm:a) Very few commenters ever expressed a change of mind.b) Some fought against the mounting evidence against Salby's credibility, just ignored it and kept on discussing,Some could do nothing better than write ad hominems against those who posted real info (Nick was #1 attackee). Most just went away, without comment.The number who said: "I was fooled, shame on me" or equivalent was ... zero, out of 300+.

In any case, WebCite is your friend, especially if you set up a bookmarklet that makes it a 1-click and return operation.

No. I was put on moderation during this thread, and stayed there for some weeks. But AW seemed to indicate here that this should have been a temporary measure enabling my responses to get enhanced attention, and he just forgot to switch it off. And indeed, I do seem to be unmoderated now.

Is there interesting stuff there? There's nothing interesting from a scientific point of view: just a rehash of the same old stupid misunderstandings and the obvious answers. People agree that's its great to write utter tripe, because "science is all about correcting errors", or some other transparent excuse for ignorance. Denica Bozhinova and says some obvious things, too. What were the interesting bits (this is a serious question)?

Not scientifically interesting. But all three bloggers (including AW) tried to explain themselves, and the author as well chipping in, although since her paper was not on the topic at all, she didn't have much to add.

I noticed David Appell's banning disappeared from the resurrected thread.